At the Frontier February 12 2012

As a former museum volunteer and as an interpreter, I absolutely absorbed the first joint Museums Australia / Interpretation Australia Conference in Perth, 2011.

My talk was on the iPhone application we are currently developing with Bluehat – ScavBot – so it was great to hear details of so many innovative new media Australian projects from people like Michael Parry from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Michael Harvey from the Australian Museum and Andrew Bowman, who is doing some amazing work for the Carnamah Historical Society in WA.

Another highlight was the dynamite Tuesday Pecha Kucha session where a packed Theatre Studio was dazzled by five separate speakers in the space of only an hour and half. Topics ranged eclectically from Jacqueline Healy’s high quality contemporary art installations at the historic Bundoora Homestead, to self-described ‘rogue historian and jeweller’ Helena Bogucki’s intriguing artistic process and Lilly Hibbard’s provocative ‘Benevolent Asylum’ incarceration research project. It truly was a session packed full of flavour and difficult to forget.

A really moving presentation was Masaaki Morishito’s vivid description of recovery efforts for ‘Cultural Properties’  in post-Tsunami Japan. There was audible despair in the full Heath Ledger Theatre from museum (and interpretation) workers when Mr Morishito showed before and after photographs of a particularly badly effected museum. 

Some thoughts to digest that came out of the conference were questions about the additional work required to maintain online collections, the future of the WA museum, the potential applications for Near Field technology, the opportunities to reinvigorate regional museums and the oft-repeated but still dissected concept of the museum as ‘a safe place for unsafe ideas’. There were plenty of moments to reflect on our role as interpreters, which I think is a healthy thing to do, and often. Moana Davey from Waikato Museum in New Zealand commented on the last day of the Conference – “too often we think that we can tell other people’s stories”.